What is Customer Experience?

Before companies can ensure their customers will have a good experience with the company or brand, it's important to understand what is "customer experience." Listen to Hank Barnes define "customer experience."

Transcript

Customer experience is not a great marketing campaign. Customer experience is the perceptions, so perceptions are tricky right because everyone has different ones, but it’s the perceptions that people have about a company or a product based on every interaction they have with them directly or indirectly.

So, if someone talks to me about a company and I give them an opinion, that’s part of their customer experience. If they see an ad from them, that’s going to impact their experience. When they interact with sales reps, that impacts it, and when they start using the product and the user experience impacts it and the service experience. So it’s the sum of all of that. Customer experience again is not great marketing. It is delivering value to customers and everything around it.

Customer experience is not a great marketing campaign. Customer experience is the perceptions, so perceptions are tricky right because everyone has different ones, but it’s the perceptions that people have about a company or a product based on every interaction they have with them directly or indirectly.

So, if someone talks to me about a company and I give them an opinion, that’s part of their customer experience. If they see an ad from them, that’s going to impact their experience. When they interact with sales reps, that impacts it, and when they start using the product and the user experience impacts it and the service experience. So it’s the sum of all of that. Customer experience again is not great marketing. It is delivering value to customers and everything around it.

Tiffani Bova is a VP and Distinguished Analyst with Gartner Research, where she covers IT sales strategies and channel innovation. She was the recipient of Gartner's Thought Leadership Award in 2013 for her work on the Future of IT Sales (www.gartner.com/futureofitsales).

Modern organizations must consider their relationship to customers, including the possible universe of digital touch points. Although analyzing customer experience with journey maps offers a traditional approach, we should evaluate whether this method is sufficient for today's digital enterprise.